Trip to the Lunching Pad

I’ve been shooting Walt Disney World for a couple years now to the point I feel I’ve covered a lot of the common angles for the various go to shots. One thing I tried to do this trip was mix in some off angle shots to try and switch things up a bit. In this case shooting straight on as I’ve done before can actually be a negative as the trees in front of the Lunching Pad end up obstructing some of the cool details.

I was looking for a cool angle off to the side and what drew me to shoot it from this spot was actually the lines on the floor. I felt the lines on the left hand side made a really cool swoop into the frame leading up to the Lunching Pad. Additionally this spot gave me an unobstructed view of the neon ‘The Lunching Pad’ sign that I really love.

Once again this was a 5 shot bracket using the Nikon 14-24 2.8. In this case I actually used Photomatix to blend as I preferred the results I was getting versus manual blending with luminosity masks. I’ve actually found with areas that are very brightly lit but then have some difficult highlights to control, in this case the Lunching Pad neon sign itself, I get better results using Photomatix instead of manual blending. This of course may just be a knowledge/experience issue on my part and I’ll continue to experiment and work on getting better results with manual blending as its still my overall preferred method. I hope you enjoy the end result.

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